Short answer: Use manual bidding, not Maximum Delivery. Start at least 30% below LinkedIn's recommended bid. If the campaign keeps hitting its daily budget, drop the bid 10% a day until it doesn't. If it won't spend, raise it 10% or widen the audience.
Want to spend all your money and make everything cost too much? Use Maximum Delivery. LinkedIn picks it for you on nearly every campaign, and it tells LinkedIn to spend your whole budget at whatever price the auction asks. Here's how we bid instead.
What bidding options does LinkedIn give you?
Maximum Delivery: LinkedIn sets your bids to spend your whole budget. You don't set a price.
Cost Cap: You set the most you'll pay per result and LinkedIn tries to stay at or under it. It's an option on Lead Generation campaigns.
Manual bidding: You set the bid. LinkedIn shows a recommended bid next to it.
Why don't we use Maximum Delivery?
Max Delivery only cares about one thing: spending your budget. It doesn't care what it pays to get there. On B2B audiences, where a lot of advertisers are chasing the same buyers, that means you pay more per click than you need to.
It also hides what's going on. When LinkedIn sets the price, you can't tell whether costs went up because of your audience, your creative or the auction.
Why start 30% below the recommended bid?
LinkedIn's recommended bid assumes your ad will have a low CTR. If your creative is any good, bidding at the recommendation means you'll burn through your budget way too fast. So start at least 30% below it and work from there.
How do you adjust manual bids?
Start at least 30% below the recommended bid.
Hitting your daily budget every day? Drop the bid 10% a day until you stop maxing out. LinkedIn doesn't pace spend like Meta does. Bid too high and it can spend your whole daily budget in the first 12 hours.
Not spending your daily budget? Either the bid is too low or the audience is too small. Raise the bid 10%, or widen the audience.
Re-check the bid range any time the audience size changes. Bigger audiences usually mean cheaper bids.
Use daily budgets only. Lifetime budgets pace terribly, and daily plus lifetime means managing caps by hand.
One more thing: LinkedIn runs on GMT, so your daily budget resets around 5pm Pacific. Keep that in mind when you look at daily pacing.
Which objective should you bid on?
If a campaign gets fewer than 10 conversions a week, use the Website Clicks objective with manual CPC instead of Website Conversions. LinkedIn doesn't have enough data to optimize for conversions below that. And remember, LinkedIn isn't algorithmic like Meta. Performance won't get better on its own. You have to make the changes.
When do Cost Cap or Maximum Delivery make sense?
Cost Cap is worth testing on Lead Generation campaigns when you know the cost per lead you need to hit. Maximum Delivery is fine for Awareness and Video Views, where click cost matters less. Heads up: the Awareness objective forces automated bidding. If you want CPC control on a brand campaign, use Engagement instead.
FAQ
Is manual bidding better than Maximum Delivery on LinkedIn?
For most B2B campaigns, yes. You control what you pay, and you can actually see why costs move.
How much should I bid on LinkedIn ads?
Start at least 30% below LinkedIn's recommended bid. Lower it 10% a day if you keep hitting your daily budget, or raise it 10% if you aren't spending.
Why does my LinkedIn campaign spend its whole budget by midday?
Your bid is too high. LinkedIn doesn't pace spend through the day like Meta. Lower the bid 10% a day until the campaign stops maxing out.
Written by Trey Buchanan, founder of TB3 Digital. Trey has spent nine years in B2B paid media and has twice been selected for LinkedIn's Customer Advisory Board. This is one of the seven things we do on every account. See the full list in How TB3 runs LinkedIn Ads, or book a strategy call and we'll look at your account with you.